Bruce Miller, MD, a behavioral neurologist and director of the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, participated in a roundtable discussion on Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia on the “Charlie Rose Show,” which aired on Feb. 24, 2012.

“Planning for Hope: Living with Frontotemporal Disease” is a documentary with unprecedented access inside of the mind and lives of patients coping with this terminal disease. Patients share their heart-wrenching stories of perpetual grief from the loss of skills, capabilities, their jobs, families, tremendous financial ruin and the suffering from the stigma that goes with dementia. Many have been told they only have a few years to live. The challenge is to shed light and bring awareness to the disease, to share optimism, and find a cure. We must listen to our own bodies, and then the physicians need to listen and believe us. “Planning for Hope: Living with Frontotemporal Disease” was produced by Susan Grant and Cindy Dilks in association with FTLDA.

Charlie Rose Brain Series 2: Generalized Defects in Cognition: Alzheimer’s Disease with Eric Kandel of Columbia University, Marc Tessier-Lavigne of Rockefeller University, Alison Goate of Washington University’s School of Medicine in St. Louis, David Holtzman of Washington University in St. Louis and Bruce Miller of University of California, San Francisco

The UCSF Memory and Aging Center is at the forefront of discovering the causes, treatments and cures of dementia. All of the dementias — including Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia (FTD), Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), Huntington’s disease and Lewy body dementias — share common features. They all are illnesses in which normal proteins are misprocessed.

Neurologist William Seeley was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011. The Fellowship is a $500,000, no-strings-attached grant for individuals who have shown exceptional creativity in their work and the promise to do more. Learn more at ‪http://www.macfound.org/fellows

Dementia is a problem of the elderly, right? Generally that’s true. But there is one form of the disease that can strike people when they are very young, in their 20’s or even their teens. It’s called Frontotemporal Dementia, or FTD. And while rare, it devastates lives by rapidly turning young, vital people into those who need constant care.